Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America / Edition 4

by John Charles Chasteen

Overview

The most readable, highly regarded, and affordable history of Latin America for our times.

Born in Blood and Fire, Fourth Edition has been extensively revised to heighten emphasis on current cultural analyses of Latin American society and facilitate meaningful connections between the Encounter and the present. Throughout the Fourth Edition, a new full-color design highlights an enriched and expanded map and illustration program. This, along with new quizzing and assessment options and a new edition of the companion reader, offers students and instructors more support than ever before.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393283051
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/21/2016
Edition description:	Fourth Edition
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	190,137
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

John Charles Chasteen is professor of history emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Born in Blood and Fire, the best-selling history of Latin America.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

FIRST STOP,
THE PRESENT

       Latin America was born in blood and fire, in conquest and slavery. So that is where to begin a brief introduction to Latin American history, cutting straight to the heart of the matter, identifying central conflicts, and not mincing words. It is precisely conquest and its sequel, colonization, that created the central conflict of Latin American history. Conquest and colonization form the unified starting place of a single story, told here with illustrative examples from many countries. We need a single story. Rapid panoramas of twenty national histories would merely produce dizziness. But, before beginning the story, we must ask whether nineteen countries can really share a single history. At first blush, one might doubt it. Consider everything that story would have to encompass. Consider the contrasts and paradoxes of contemporary Latin America.

    Latin America is young—an average age in the teens in many countries—a burgeoning land with a population soon to reach a half billion, with all the innovative dynamism that youth implies. And it is old—a land of ancient ruins, of whitewashed walls and red tile-roofed hamlets continuously inhabited for a thousand years. Some Latin Americans still grow corn or manioc on small plots hidden among banana trees, carrying on fairly traditional rural ways of life. These days, though, most Latin Americans live in noisy, restless cities that make their societies far more urbanized than those of developing countries in Asia or Africa. Megacities like BuenosAires,São Paulo, and Mexico City have far outstripped the ten-million mark, and many other capitals of the region are not far behind. Latin America is the developing world and also the West, a place where more than nine out of ten people speak a European language and practice a European religion. Most of the world's Roman Catholics are Latin Americans. And Latin America has deep roots in indigenous cultures, too. Most of the world's native Americans, by far, live south of the Rio Grande.

    Today many Latin Americans live and work in circumstances not so different from those of middle-class people in the United States. The resemblance seems to have grown in recent years, as government after government throughout the region has liberalized its trade policies, facilitating the importation of cars, videocassette recorders, and fax machines. But the vast majority of Latin Americans are far from being able to afford such things. A family that owns any sort of car is much better off than most, but the great majority do have some access to a TV, if only at the house of a neighbor. So Brazilians and Chileans and Colombians who cannot have a car nevertheless live thoroughly immersed in Western consumer culture and, night after night, watch bright television commercials tailored to those able to emulate the lifestyle of the U.S. middle class. It is for this reason, and not just because of proximity and poverty, that so many Latin Americans come to the United States.

    Consider next the contrasts among countries. Brazil occupies half the South American continent, its population surging toward two hundred million. Most countries in Latin America are quite small, however. The populations of Panama, Puerto Rico, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador added together could fit in Mexico City or, for that matter, in Brazil's urban giant, São Paulo. Contrasts in other social indicators are also vast. Argentina and Uruguay have adult literacy rates comparable to those in the United States and Canada, whereas 44 percent of the adult population in Guatemala cannot read. Costa Ricans live to a ripe, old average age of 77, Bolivians to only 62.

    Now ponder the incredible ethnic complexity of Latin America. Most Mexicans are descended from indigenous people and from the Spanish who colonized Mexico. The Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead—with its candy skulls, inviting people to "eat their own death"—embodies a mood so unfamiliar to people from the United States precisely because its intimate inspirations are largely non-Western. The capital of Argentina, on the other hand, is ethnically more European than is Washington, D.C. Not only does a larger percentage of the population descend exclusively from European immigrants, but they also maintain more European contacts, such as dual Argentine-Spanish citizenship and relatives born or still living in Italy or England. The modern cityscape of Buenos Aires is very self-consciously modeled on Paris, and French movies have a popularity there unheard of in the United States.

    The experience of racial diversity has been central to Latin American history. Latin America was the main destination of the millions of people enslaved and taken out of Africa between 1500 and 1850. Whereas the United States received about 523,000 enslaved immigrants, Cuba alone got more. All Spanish America absorbed around 1.5 million slaves, and Brazil by itself at least 3.5 million. From the Caribbean, down both coasts of South America, African slaves performed a thousand tasks, but most especially they cultivated sugarcane. Today their descendants form large parts of the population—about half, overall—in the two greatest historical centers of sugar production: Brazil and the Caribbean region.

    Latin American countries are highly multiethnic, and all sorts of racial combinations occur. Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil, like Argentina, have populations of mostly European extraction. Some countries, such as Mexico, Paraguay, El Salvador, and Chile, have very mixed, or mestizo populations of blended indigenous and European heritage. Other countries, such as Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Bolivia, have large populations of indigenous people who remain separate from the mestizos, speak indigenous languages such as Quechua or Aymara, and follow distinctive customs in clothing and food. In many countries, black and white populations live in the coastal lowlands, with a more indigenous and white mix in the mountainous interior regions. Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela all follow this pattern. Brazil, half of the South American continent, shows regional demographic variations on a grand scale: whiter in the south, blacker on the north coast, with indigenous influence still visible only in the large but sparsely populated Amazon basin.

    To repeat the question, then, does this startling variety, divided into twenty countries, really have a single history? No, in the sense that a single story cannot encompass their diversity. Yes, in the sense that all have much in common. They experienced a similar process of European conquest and colonization. They became independent more or less at the same time. They have struggled with similar problems, in a series of similar ways. Since independence, other clearly defined political trends have washed over Latin America, giving its history a unified ebb and flow.

    In 1980, most governments of the region were dictatorships of various descriptions. In 2000, elected governments rule almost everywhere. And the globalizing energies of the 1990s have helped Latin America leave behind its 1980s "Lost Decade" of debt, inflation, and stagnation. Economic recovery has given prestige to the "neoliberal" (basically free market) policies pursued by practically all governments in the region. But, as in much of the world, current free market growth seems to make the rich richer, the middle class more middle class, and the poor comparatively poorer. In Latin America, with a poor majority, that kind of growth can produce more losers than winners.

    Winners and losers. Rich and poor. Conquerors and conquered. Masters and slaves. That is the old, old conflict at the heart of Latin American history. The conflict remained alive and well in the 1990s. To protest the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States and Mexico in the 1990s, Mayan rebels began an uprising that lasted years. These Mayan rebels took the name Zapatistas in memory of earlier rebels, many of them indigenous, who fought for land reform in the early 1900s. Meanwhile, middle-class Mexicans found that NAFTA reduced the prices and increased the availability of urban consumer goods. The Zapatistas continued to protest, but the Mexican government kept NAFTA in place.

    Aspects of this confrontation can be traced straight back to 1492, which is exactly the purpose of this book. Here, in a nutshell, is the story: In the 1500s, Spanish and Portuguese colonizers imposed their language, their religion, and all their social institutions on the indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans, people who labored for them in mines and fields and who served them, too, at table and in bed. After three centuries of this, however, things began to change (at least partly) with the introduction of two new political forces.

    The first force was liberalism. Students should carefully separate this international meaning of liberalism from narrow U.S. uses of the word. Liberalism, in this larger sense, composes the core principles of the U.S. constitution, principles shared by Republicans and Democrats alike. Historically, liberalism is a complex of values and practices that developed in the 1600s and 1700s, largely in France and England. Both 1776 and 1789 (marking the American and French Revolutions) are landmark dates in world liberalism. Liberalism favors progress over tradition, reason over faith, universal over local values, and the free market over government control. Liberalism also advocates equal citizenship over entrenched privilege and representative democracy over all other forms of government. Unfortunately, these last elements have sometimes been treated as icing on the cake, a finishing touch too often put off. Overall, the U.S. experience with liberalism has produced prosperity. The Latin American experience with liberalism, on the other hand, has been more mixed.

    Nationalism, the second new political force, eventually became liberalism's rough opposite. Liberalism and nationalism emerged together in the struggle for Latin American independence. Latin American nationalism—different in different countries but always built on similar themes—is deeply embedded in the region's historical experience. A portrait of it will emerge gradually over the course of this book. One initial observation: people in the United States often regard nationalism (nationalism elsewhere, anyway) as negative. But Latin American nationalism has often provided an ideological self-defense against imperialism, a positive force for social equality, and an antidote to white supremacy.

    At the turn of the twenty-first century, Europeans no longer ride on the backs of indigenous porters or in sedan chairs carried by African slaves. But everywhere, wealthier people still have lighter skin and poorer people still have darker skin—a sweeping but sadly accurate generalization that does have exceptions, and lots of them, but only of the kind that prove the rule. The conclusion is inescapable: the descendants of the Spanish, the Portuguese, and later European immigrants to Latin America still hold power, and the people who descend from slaves and subjugated indigenous people still work for them. Half a millennium later, this is clearly the enduring legacy, rippling across the centuries, of the fact that African, European, and indigenous American people did not come together on neutral terms, like various pedestrians arriving simultaneously at a bus stop. Just how they did come together will be our concern in the next chapter. (Get ready for the blood and fire.)

    This quick introduction is for U.S. readers who are encountering Latin American history for the first time. Such readers need to know something about past U.S. thinking on Latin America, because examples of it float freely in our popular culture and still influence our ideas.

    Until roughly the 1930s, the interpreters of Latin America focused largely on race and culture, considering the Latin American varieties defective goods, responsible for such woes as poverty, political instability, and dictatorship. "Hot-blooded Latins" with too much "nonwhite blood," according to this outmoded idea, simply lacked the self-discipline and the brains to make stable, democratic, prosperous societies. As Catholics, they lacked a "Protestant work ethic" (to make work not just a necessity, but a virtue), and their tropical climates further discouraged economic activity with debilitating heat and too many sensuous satisfactions—mangoes, papayas, and passion fruit—literally, as well as figuratively, growing on trees. In this version, Latin American history was racially, culturally, or environmentally "determined," and more or less inescapably so. Another U.S. image of Latin Americans created during these years was the image of laziness, of the indolent peasant snoozing under a large Mexican sombrero, an image totally refuted by the hard-working reality of the Mexican farmworkers who migrated into the southwestern United States as braceros ("hired hands") after World War II.

    Between 1940 and 1970, racial and environmental determinism went out of style intellectually. U.S. historians of Latin America replaced the former villains of the region's history (those pesky indigenous or African genes) with new bad guys: backward mentalities and traditional social structures that had to be "modernized" (basically, made more like those of the United States) so that Latin America could advance in stages along the developmental trail blazed by other countries. Large landowners who monopolized fertile soils in ostentatious, unproductive estates, conservative priests who opposed modern social legislation such as that governing divorce, generals who just could not get used to democracy—these took over from laziness, hot-bloodedness, and tropical heat as explanations for Latin America's problems.

    After the mid-1960s, most students of Latin America became convinced that earlier interpretations of its problems were a convenient way to blame the victim. Instead, they argued that Latin American economies stood in a dependent position relative to the world's industrial powers, which used their existing advantage to forestall Latin American industrialization. They believed that "economic dependency," and not an overly traditional culture, explained why Latin American development did not follow the path of its supposed models.

    Today, the dependency model still provides some useful insights, but it has lost its central place in Latin American studies. Within the United States, interest in Latin America now focuses on matters that also preoccupy us at home. As U.S. citizens consider "multiracial" census categories and explore new ways of thinking about race, for example, they are interested to learn that Latin Americans long ago began to think in terms of multiracial identities. People concerned with multiculturalism and "identity politics" in the United States find a valuable comparative perspective in Latin America. By the 1990s, both the humanities and the social sciences gave a new prominence to the study of culture and, more specifically, to the way race, gender, class, and national identities are "constructed" in people's minds. (To be male or female is a matter of genes, of biology, but the definition of a "real man" or a "real woman," for example, differs greatly from culture to culture.) In matters of cultural and racial complexity, the world has much to learn from the Latin American experience.

    Let us begin our story.

Table of Contents

Maps ix

Acknowledgment xi

Time Line xii

Introduction 1

1 Encounter 11

Countercurrents: Friar Bartolomé de las Casas 43

2 Colonial Crucible 49

Countercurrents: Colonial Rebellions 81

3 Independence 87

Countercurrents: The Gaze of Outsiders 111

4 Postcolonial Blues 117

Countercurrents: The Power of Outsiders 144

5 Progress 149

Countercurrents: International Wars 177

6 Neocolonialism 181

Countercurrents: New Immigration to Latin America 211

7 Nationalism 217

Countercurrents: Populist Leaders of the Twentieth Century 248

8 Revolution 253

Countercurrents: Liberation Theology 280

9 Reaction 285

Countercurrents: La Violencia, Pablo Escobar, and Colombia's Long Torment 313

10 Neoliberalism 319

Glossary A1

Further Acknowledgments A9

Index A11

Editorial Reviews

In a history that is concise yet satisfying, Chasteen, a historian at UNC-Chapel Hill, looks at critical Latin American events ranging from the original encounter of Europeans with the indigenous peoples of Latin America to the present day destruction of the Amazonian rain forest. He offers portraits of such well-known figures as Sim n Bol var, Jos de San Mart n and August n Iturbide, as well as lesser-known ones such as Canek, a Yucatec Maya who led a short but important revolt against Spanish rule in Mexico in 1761. Chasteen focuses on major political, social and economic topics and trends that helped shape Latin America, including liberalism, the caste system, the mixing of races, nationalism and the Western notion of "Progress"; he also examines the role that Europe and the United States played in the development of these phenomena. Also refreshing is Chasteen's examination of the periods he covers from the perspective of women; he refers to many who played a central role, such as the celebrated Sister Juana In s de la Cruz and Juana Azurduy, as well as less popular Gertrudis Bocanegra, a Mexican woman who was executed for carrying messages to the Patriots. From the glorious and bloody battles for independence, through the trying periods of post- and neocolonialism, the finding of "national" identity and the more recent anti-Communist dictatorships from the 1960s to the 1980, to hope for a future of true democracy, this is a comprehensive and illuminating history. (Jan.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Packing a history of more than 20 different countries over a 400-year period into only 300 pages is a difficult task. But Chasteen (history, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), who is responsible for translating Tulio Halperin Donghi's major The Contemporary History of Latin America, makes an admirable attempt. He explores similarities and themes that are important to that part of the world, focusing on such Latin American figures as Hernando Cort s, Sister Juana In s de la Cruz, Sim n Bol var, Juan and Evita Per n, and Che Guevara. This concise and well-written account provides an introduction to the events of history as well as the complexities of this immense continent. It will be of interest to general public and college libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/00.]--Mark L. Grover, Brigham Young Univ., Provo, UT Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In this text for students and the general reader, Chasteen (history, U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) discusses the history of 20 Latin American countries from the first contact with Europeans in 1492 to the present. The text is accompanied throughout by maps and black and white photographs. The volume does not include bibliographical references. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Born In Blood And Fire is a superbly presented and concise history of Latin America which covers six centuries and twenty countries, linking accounts of individuals, economics, politics and social structure in a uniform, logical progression of events which will delight both general readers and students seeking an introduction to the region's history. Chapters provide many insights on Latin issues in the process of revealing the history of different nations. Born In Blood And Fire is an invaluable introduction and survey for students of Latin American history.